Pure electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles are beginning to take hold in the marketplace. The price of energy for operating an electric vehicle is much lower than that of running a conventional gasoline vehicle. For example, in today's prices, to drive an electric vehicle 30 miles costs around $0.60 compared with around $2.00-$3.00 for a gasoline vehicle. However, one of the challenges with electric vehicle transportation is the ability for electric vehicle users to conveniently recharge their vehicles at remote locations, while providing adequate compensation to both real estate owners and electricity producers. Although electric vehicles are four to five times more efficient than gasoline cars, they suffer from a lack of infrastructure that effectively limits how far they can travel.
Increasing the number of locations for vehicles to recharge quickly could mean lower costs by reducing battery payloads, and would broaden the range of travel. Nevertheless, conventional efforts to accelerate the installation and adoption of charging locations have been elusive and ineffective. Difficulties persist, particularly in the areas of providing secure monitoring and control of the electricity distribution to the electric vehicles. Moreover, challenges remain for providing automated tracking and billing. These are only a few of the challenges presented by conventional approaches, which are impeding the wider adoption of electric vehicle technologies, and ultimately hurting efforts for energy independence and environmental responsibility.
Accordingly, a need remains for a method, system, and apparatus for distributing electricity to electric vehicles, monitoring the distribution thereof, and for providing automated billing.
The foregoing and other features of the invention will become more readily apparent from the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.